


Not His Cup of Tea

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BAMF John Watson, John Watson Works for Mycroft Holmes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 02:58:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13941120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: John had gone through six months of intensive military training, another six of MI5, and exactly one day of being Mycroft’s personal assistant. But five minutes with Sherlock Holmes and everything he has ever learned goes out the window.





	Not His Cup of Tea

They never try to run, apparently.

Of course, that’s not very comforting coming from the woman whom John is replacing, whose speech is nasally and barely distinguishable through a layer of gauze. She doesn’t seem very happy over the fact that John is taking over her job, and, to be honest, John isn’t sure if he is, either.

James Sholto avoids the payphones for two blocks before picking up. When he enters the black limousine, it’s with an air of determined dignity, like he knows it won’t happen but he’s still expecting someone to open and close the car door for him.

John remembers when he was the one being tailed. No creepy cameras or tailing cars. He’s almost offended, really: you’d think he’d get some fancy-ass CCTV tricks and intimidation. But, guess not.

The man slides into the seat and gives the other a long look. “Hello.”

“Hi.”

“Your name is?”

“Phil.”

“That’s not your real name, is it?”

John smiles. “Nope.”

He looks back to his phone. There is nothing on the screen save for one previous text:  _ His name is James Sholto. MH _

John keeps his eyes on the phone, watching Sholto through his peripheral vision.

The word  _ army  _ shines through everything about him: close-cropped hair, colour leached by the sun. The way he holds himself. John feels a twinge of what is almost a connection— _ I was almost you,  _ he thought. Joined the army, trained for a couple of years. 

Just a little too smart and a little too sharp, John was plucked from the army and dropped into the bizarre world of MI5.

James Sholto’s hands clench and unclench. His eyes dart around the car.

As they pull up to the parking lot, John sees Mycroft at the end. He wonders if he purposely stood there so that the light would cast down upon him in a ominous silhouette. From what he’s gathered for the years he’s been working with him, probably yes. 

Sholto waits half a second as the door unlocks, and then swings it open so hard John can nearly see the driver wince as the door makes a cracking noise. He leaps out and hits the ground running.

_ They never try to run.  _

John snorts, and dashes out of the car.

He’s fast—when John tackles him, it’s nearly a dozen metres away.

John grunts as the man whacks an elbow back. “It’s just a talk, mate, we’re not gonna hurt you.”

“Why am I here?”

“Not my job to tell.”

“Then whose?”

John glances back to where Mycroft is still leaning on his umbrella, watching them with vague interest.

“The…” Damn. Anthea never told him how to respond to this. 

“Umbrella man,” John says, and leads Sholto to the end of the lot, where Mycroft takes over.

John backs off silently and enters the car. That much of what he should do, he knew. It doesn’t stop him from peering out the window, wishing that his top-secret-agent-training-for-the-British-Government-aka-Mycroft-Holmes had taught him how to lip read. Honestly, you’d think.

He gets a couple words, a  _ welcome back,  _ and some fancy umbrella spins, and then Sholto is opening the door and sliding back in.

Baker Street is only ten minutes away. Sholto steps up and into the flat, and the car drives away.

“I’m dropping you off at your house,” Anthea says through a wad of gauze.

“Right.” John hums, looking out the window at the door of 221B. “Who is this bloke, anyways?”

He doesn’t need to specify. They both know who he’s talking about. This may be John’s first day at this particular job, but he knows enough about Sherlock Holmes, ostensibly the brother of the entire British Government, to make him want to know more about him. Going through a dozen different flatmates in the span of a few weeks—must be some guy.

* * *

Now that he thought of it, Mycroft texted like John’s ex: send a single message and then immediately leave. 

But, unlike his ex, John didn’t walk in on Mycroft shagging another man in his own bed.

John has no clue how long he’s been at the bar. Probably longer than he should. 

He also doesn’t know how many drinks he’s had. Definitely more than he should.

He’s sipping at his ???th drink, mesmerized by how the liquid seemed to slosh around in the cup by itself, along with the entire world, when someone says something behind him.

Except that John doesn’t hear it, because he’s too busy tossing back the glass, trying to get the image of the two people in his— _ his _ —bed out of where they burned into the back of his eyelids.

The person repeats whatever they were saying over again. John runs his tongue across the rim of the empty glass and wonders if Mycroft would bail him out after commiting a double homicide.

A hand lands on his shoulder.

It must be intuition, muscle memory, because John can’t even hold on to a thought for more than a second before having it slip away from his grasp, but his arm flies back and whaps the intruder straight in the face.

He stands up and whirls around, faces whoever had the gall to touch him—and that was as far as his muscle memory went.

He blinks, and the world tips forwards and crashes down.

He hits the ground with a crack and a flash of pain, dulled by the alcohol at first, and then spiking and flaring out.

Rolling over because his legs weren’t working, John groans and squints up at a blurry face.

“Bzuh,” he mumbles.

Someone grabs him by the arms, trying to hoist him up.

_ “Woah!”  _ John flails and the arms drop him back to the ground, where he lies glaring. “Don’t touch me.”

A chuckle comes from somewhere to the the side, and then suddenly there’s a voice right next to his ear, a low murmur, and, for some reason, instead of slapping it away John freezes.

“I’m going to take you outside,” the voice purrs. “You need fresh air.”

“Oh,” John says, and tries to sit up. “My bones aren’t working,” he says. He didn’t mean to say it out loud.

The chuckle again, and it’s so close to his ear that it rumbles, sends a shiver down John’s spine. “Don’t struggle,” it says, and arms are lifting him up again.

“Don’t touch me,” John mumbles.

“Too bad.” 

John can’t seem to argue with that. He lolls his head against the stranger’s chest.

They exit the pub, and the blast of cold air hits him like a bullet. He yells, squirming in the man’s grasp.

“S’fucking freezing.” He clings onto the source of heat and burrows his head in. “Mm.”

The arms loosen. “You are incredibly drunk.”

John doesn’t budge. “Fucking freezing,” he says again, and tightens his hold.

The arms shove him back, hard, and he hits the wall behind him. 

_ Ow.  _ John rubs the back of his head, scowling and glaring. He squints, and finally gets a good look at the man.

Oh. 

Oh fuck.

“I am really drunk,” John says, and then, “fucking fuck.”

“Really?” says Sherlock Holmes (oh fuck fuckity fuck), his eyebrow raised elegantly, dark curls tumbling down his forehead, lips curled up in a cross between a sneer and a smile, and  _ wow,  _ John is really drunk.

“Your coat,” is all John manages to say.

“What about it?” God, those eyes. Those cheekbones. Great, John thinks blithely. Just brilliant. He has a crush on his boss’s younger brother. Whom he just clung to like a persistent mussel.

“It’s—” John feels like he swallowed a shot glass of sand. “I am going to be sick.”

He turns to the bin on the street, which is uncoincidentally right outside the bar, and does just that.

After, he raises his head and looks up at Sherlock (holy shit holy shit), who seems both incredibly amused and incredibly disgusted at the same time.

“I’m—” John wipes his mouth and his hand comes off with a red streak. “Oh.”

John twitches his nose and winces. 

He turns to Sherlock and points to his nose. “That’s your fault, by the way.”

Sherlock raises an eyebrow.

“You…” John repeats the word  _ you  _ a couple more times as he racks his piss-poor memory. “You moved out of the way.”

Eye roll. “Of course I did.”

John wrinkles his nose. (Ow.) “You could’ve caught me,” he said.

“You must get drunk very easily. Or are you usually this slow?”

“Oi,” John says, and tries to come up with something witty to say.

Sherlock tilts his head and smirks.  _ Damn. Fuck. _

Say something, idiot. 

Sherlock watches him curiously with unnerving, icy eyes, which makes it absolutely impossible to think of anything to say.

A moment passes. Sherlock scoffs and turns to leave.

“Woah, hey!” John tries to grab him but his depth perception is currently passed out and vomiting in the corner of his mind, so he ends up swiping at the air. “You can’t just leave!”

“Of course I can.” And he does just that.

John is left in the front of a bar, feeling as completely sober as he can while being pissed off his tits, his nose dripping blood all over his shirt.

His phone buzzes. He takes it out in a daze.

_ Get in. MH _

John turns and looks at the black limousine on the side of the street.

* * *

 

John grits his teeth and starts up the stairs.

The voices leach through the door. One, the silky, slimy voice he knew all too well. The other, the low rumble that gave him the Pavlovian effect of a throbbing in his scalp.

“My dear brother—”

_ “My dear brother,  _ I will not tolerate this. Is it not enough to have security cameras over every square inch of London? I will not surrender my flat to your  _ spies!” _

A long-suffering sigh. “This is for your own good.”

“Are we resorting to b-list movie quotes, now?”

And before the two Holmeses can keep firing their banter back and forth (they could probably bicker for hours—John didn’t want to imagine the Christmas dinners), John opens the door.

He braces himself for the reaction, but it still doesn’t keep the grimace off his face at Sherlock’s reaction upon seeing him.

“You are positively sadistic,” Sherlock announces to Mycroft.

Mycroft’s face is passive, but  _ hell  _ if he wasn’t doing this on purpose, that bastard. He was probably cackling maniacally in his mind right now. 

“He will be by your side at all times,” Mycroft says.

What the fuck? Mycroft didn’t fucking tell John that.

“I don’t need a bodyguard,” Sherlock snarls.

“You don’t need a bodyguard, and you have been attacked on four separate occasions in the past three days.”

“I have James.”

“And where is he right now?” Mycroft says coolly. “There’s a reason I chose John Watson.”

Mycroft turns to him. “You have your gun?”

John takes it out, albeit confusedly.

Turning to the far wall, Mycroft nods to it. “Shoot it.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Shoot the wall.”

John pauses for a moment, and then thinks, fuck it, why not?

He points the gun to the wall, where there’s, for some reason, a spray-painted smiley face with crossed-out eyes..

Just before he shoots, John glances at Mycroft. He isn’t looking at him, but at Sherlock. 

Right as he eases in on the trigger, there’s a flash of motion from the corner of his eye.

Mycroft launches himself at John. Sherlock dives down at his legs. 

A bang rings out through the room, and John spins and slams the still-smoking barrel into Mycroft’s temple, not as hard as he could, but enough to give him a hell of a headache. At the same time he side-steps out of Sherlock’s reach and gives him a solid roundhouse kick to the side. He shoves and Mycroft stumbles to the floor. Sherlock aims a punch at John; John deflects it and twists around to elbow him in the same spot he kicked, simultaneously pointing the gun in his left hand at the wall.

The bang echoes and fades away with a faint ringing in all three pairs of ears.

John tucks his gun away and covers it with the tail of his shirt. He smoothes it down.

Mycroft pats his hair, gently prodding a spot on the side of his head, eyes trained at the two bullet-marks, straight through the x’d out eyes on the wall.

Sherlock keeps a hand on his side. There’s gonna be one hell of a bruise, there. He deserved it, that twit. He’s looking at John with narrowed eyes. 

John lifts his chin defiantly.

“One week,” Sherlock says. “I’ll have the pursuer tracked down by then.”

“Like a bloody free trial period,” John mutters.

“Stay safe,” Mycroft says silkily, heading for the door. He stumbles very slightly, and John eyes the growing bruise on the side of his temple, and thinks, whoops. 

The door clicks closed. 

John looks back to Sherlock, who hasn’t taken his eyes off him. 

John lifts an eyebrow in challenge. “What?”

Sherlock smiles. “So you do get drunk very easily.”

* * *

 

“This isn’t going to work,” Sherlock says bluntly. Any traces of his previous satisfaction at John’s abilities has all but leached away, leaving nothing but a sulking, complaining ball of bitterness. “Mycroft knows this. He’s just doing this to mock me.” He flips his dressing gown and collapses onto the couch. “I hate him, I hate him. Why does he have to be so horrible?”

John can’t help but feel just a bit offended. “I’m here to protect you. It’s not like he hired an assassin.” 

He takes one step towards Sherlock and a stabbing pain shoots up his left foot.

“Ah, fuck!” He hops, staggering back, and bangs his hip against the coffee table. “Fuck!”

Sherlock looks at John. “You could stand to expand your profanity.”

“Fuck you,” John says, and falls back onto the couch—but not before checking it for any more thumbtacks. 

He grits his teeth and yanks out the small blue object protruding from his foot with a quiet hiss.

“Right. First thing I’ll need: a pair of slippers.” He presses a thumb to the wound. “Damn.” He glares. “Who leaves thumbtacks all over the floor?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “A  _ thumbtack _ can take you out?”

John ignores him. He gets up from the couch and brushes off the sting from the bottom of his foot. “Well,” he says, “Element of surprise. Won’t happen again.”

Sherlock hums a bit. John gives him a dubious look—from what he’s gathered, Sherlock seems like the type of person to start purposely scattering thumbtacks all over the floor for John to step on, now.

“I’m making tea,” John says deliberately. “I hope there aren’t any more thumbtacks in the kitchen.”

Sherlock doesn’t say anything.

John stops. “What?”

Sherlock actually grins.

_ “What?” _

“Nothing,” Sherlock says. “Kettle’s on the counter. Just boiled.”

John keeps half an eye on Sherlock as he maneuvers into the kitchen—

And immediately turns around and walks right back out.

“So,” John says to Sherlock, whose grin has only widened. “Not thumb _ tacks.  _ Just thumbs, then.”

“It’s not like they were using them anymore.”

“Tell me they were from the morgue.”

“Just _ some.” _ Sherlock says this with a lisp.

John tries to swear, but halfway up his throat it accidentally turns into a laugh.

Sherlock leans back and languidly stretches out his legs. “Tea?”

John sighs. He’s been here for less than five minutes and things are already spiraling horribly out of control. “Tea,” he agrees, and tries again.

The thumbs are curiously easy to ignore.

And he really should’ve expected what became of the fridge.

“I’m not going to say anything,” John says.

“Mm, rather contradictory.”

John doesn’t think he’ll be able to keep someone from attempting to attack Sherlock. He thinks he might join them if it happened.

“I’m going to hope this is milk,” John says under his breath, picking up a carton with two fingers, trying to touch as little in the fridge as physically possible.

At least Sherlock has good taste: the tea is vacuum-packed, loose leaf, and, from the looks of it, more expensive than all of John’s clothes combined. He supposed that if you were possibly insane, at least you can brew a damn good cuppa.

As he’s pouring a dash of milk into one of two mugs, John gets an idea—from what’s happened, John might as well mess with him a bit. 

“How many cubes of milk?” he calls out. 

“Two,” Sherlock replies. “And a splash of sugar.”

John’s hand stops halfway. 

Sherlock’s chuckle makes him want to throw the mug against the wall.

“You should know better,” Sherlock chides.

When John doesn’t reply, Sherlock continues, “Black with two sugars.”

John glowers. He adds about one single tablespoon of tea before topping the rest up with milk. He doesn’t add any sugar.

He brings it to the living room without a saucer. “Here’s your bloody tea.”

“How did you know I liked blood in my tea?” Sherlock says conversationally as he takes the cup and peers at it. 

His face lights up. “Oh, perfect. Maybe you will do me any good after all.” He sips it and smiles with delight.

John blinks. “What?”

Sherlock kills his smile. “Honestly, John.” He pours the slightly-leafy milk all over the desk in front of him. It soaks into a scattered mess of papers and file folders that look awfully important.

“What the—” John shoves a hand into his hair. “What is wrong with you?”

“I take it back. You’re not a lightweight; you’re always this slow.” Sherlock huffs. “Make me another cup of tea,” he demands. “Properly this time.”

“I’m not your fucking servant.”

“You made Mycroft tea, and the way he likes it, too.”

“First of all, I’ve known _ you  _ properly for less than an hour and you’re already  _ eons  _ worse than Mycroft, and that is saying a lot. Second of all, Mycroft didn’t keep thumbs in the kitchen and eyeballs in the fridge, and he sure as fuck didn’t pour tea all over…  _ are those police reports?” _

“Cold cases.” Sherlock rolls his eyes. “It’s not like they ever look at them.” 

In a sudden motion, he draws his knees up to his chest and curls up on his chair with his back facing John. “The thumbs and eyeballs are experiments, Mycroft is so much worse than me, and I need a cup of tea.” 

Now. John had gone through six months of intensive military training, another six of MI5, and exactly one day of being Mycroft’s personal assistant. But five minutes with Sherlock Holmes and every single ounce of everything he has learned goes out the fucking window.

He yanks the teacup out of Sherlock’s hands, turns, and chucks it against the wall as hard as he can.

Sherlock inclines his head. “I thought you were trained to keep your cool?”

John looks at the broken china, stuck in the wallpaper, right beside the smiley face. 

“Not with—not with  _ you,” _ he says despairingly.

Sherlock grins.

**Author's Note:**

> Dirk Gently gave me the line "How many cubes of milk?"  
> Orphaned because I forgot where I was going with this.


End file.
